There is a car I know better than the person who drives it.
A white pickup with a paddleboard strapped in the bed backs down the driveway across the street most mornings around 7 a.m.. I lift a hand from my own driveway. Whoever is behind the wheel waves back. We’ve done this for years, the same small salute, and it has never once turned into a conversation. I couldn’t tell you the driver’s name.
Last month, we talked about the people who already know us, the ones we speak to in half-sentences. This month, we turn outward, toward people we haven’t met.
The white pickup is the first of them. We live closer together than ever, yet know one another less. You can share a wall in an apartment tower for years and never learn the name of the person across the hall.
I open the audio version of this column the same way every week, with a single phrase: “Greetings, neighbor!” It’s a generous way to address someone whose name I’ve never learned.
In Luke’s gospel, there’s a moment when a man tries to pin down a definition. He asks, “Who is my neighbor?” He’s hoping, I think, for a tidy boundary, a list with clear edges. The answer he receives is a parable about a stranger who stops to help a beaten man whom respectable people have stepped around. The neighbor, it turns out, is not a name on a list. The neighbor is the person in front of you.
Most days, the person in front of me is someone I recognize but have never spoken to. The dog walker who nods at the corner. The couple two doors down whose porch light I notice when it burns late. I have never crossed the short distance to learn anything else. After enough years of waving, walking over feels more awkward than it did on the first day.
The early followers in the book of Acts were told to carry their work outward, from the city where they stood to the ends of the earth. We tend to picture the far end of that sentence, the distant places. The near end is a doorstep. We reach those far places one doorstep at a time, and the first is next door.
Many of us imagine the outward life as something grand, a cause to join, a faraway place to be sent. Instead, we should begin at the smallest possible distance. Not a mission. A walk to the end of the block, a name finally asked and remembered.
There’s a famous phrase often apocryphally credited to W.B. Yeats that frequently adorns pub walls: “There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t met yet.” The nearest stranger is the easiest person to test it on.
Next week, we’ll see what happens once we’ve said something out loud and let others carry it forward. For now, the work is smaller and closer. One of these mornings, after the wave, I could cross the street instead of turning back inside and learn the name of the friend I haven’t met yet.
Scott Tilley is the founder of CTS Ministries and an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. You’ll be able to find this column, Spirituality Today, every Sunday at floridatoday.com. Contact Tilley at stilley@cts.today.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Why we should finally talk to our neighbors | Spirituality Today
Reporting by Scott Tilley, Florida Today / Florida Today
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By Scott Tilley, Florida Today | USA TODAY Network
